TiMi stamp

The Tween went to China with my mother recently and brought home a TiMi stamp she had custom made for me. How awesome is that!

Thanks, sweetie! :)

Silk screen printing!

Pouch #27

Hand drawn with Sharpie's Stained Fabric Markers

I love using Sharpie's Stained Fabric Markers but they get blunt after a while and it becomes harder to draw fine lines. I also want to make more pouches and drawing would be really time consuming and not very practical. 

So. it is with such immense luck that The Man's friend brought over his entire silkscreen equipment to our house for storage and let us use it as much as we like. I was super excited about finally getting to experiment with silkscreen but nervous about the mess or destroying his equipment. Every time I entered the room all I could do was stare at the containers of dye, emulsion, emulsion remover, squeegee, three specially made screens and, get this, a laser printer and huge light box with 6 UV lightbulbs! All of which had hardly been used. 

Then one day I had enough of being such a chicken and announced to The Man - "Tonight's the night." And he knew I was talking about burning a screen :) 

For our first film, we used A4 paper and brushed it with oil. Apparently, that was how The Man did it in the good old days when he would stand out in the sun and count the time it took to burn a screen. He had no idea how long it would take now that we had more "professional" equipment. His friend couldn't remember either! :) To top it off we don't have a dark room and had to wait till night time to do any work which means we could hardly see what we were doing. Suffice to say, the first night was a complete disaster .

The second night was no better. Most of the tutorials I found online recommend ink-jet to print the film. Unfortunately, not one single shop here carries ink-jet transparency. So, we settled for laser print transparency, found a photocopying shop nearby that sold loose sheets and thought that since we were there we might as well photocopy our artwork onto them. Alas, we found out the hard way that as with all photocopying shops, they don't replenish their toner cartridges very often.

Finally, we used the laser printer and printed our own film but not before running into more technical problems which The Man managed to solve. By the third exhausting night of burning and washing overexposed or underexposed screens, I went to bed while The Man soldiered on to produce our first perfect screen and promptly printed our, or rather his first t-shirt. 

It has been tough but we figured out 

A) exposure time for the light box we were using = 1 min 30 seconds 

B) we have to use double layer of film per artwork to get a nice solid black that will block out light.

I wish I could say we were getting to be experts by the time we burnt my screen but we still ended up having to redo it a couple of times. 

After many days of learning, I present to you my first silk screened pouch...

Pouch #28
Silk screened and hand painted

We have yet to figure out how to silkscreen with two colours or more, so I had to hand paint the lady in red using my Pebeo Setacolor Fabric Paint.

I absolutely love silkscreen printing even if it makes me wanna tear my hair out!

More to come soon :)

Stamping!

I found these wooden blocks at Daiso and immediately thought of making some stamps. At first I tried carving them but that didn't work out. Then I remembered reading a post about using foam. Luckily I had a roll stashed somewhere. I laid it out and cut up a bunch of shapes using a blade and scissors and pasted them onto the blocks with white glue.

I figured I've got to get the most out of the blocks so I pasted on every side!

I got the idea to create the tree branches using only one simple shape from Making An Impression: Designing and Creating Artful Stamps by Geninne Zlatkis.

My stamps are a mess because I used a brush to paint on the poster colour instead of using stamp pads or a roller. For the girl I used a Chinese paint brush pen. It works almost as well as the Sakura Pigma Brush Pen. Unfortunately the bristles come off easily. I guess that's why it's cheaper :)

Chinese painting watercolour

 I was introduced to Chinese painting watercolour by a friend of mine many years ago. After abandoning it for acrylic and regular watercolour, I bought a set of Marie's Original Chinese Painting Watercolour a few months ago and left it on the shelf. It sat there staring at me until finally, I took it down and used it for this piece. The paint is creamy and the colours are rich with a slight "aged" feel to it that I like. My D & R watercolour set is in the picture too but I didn't use it much.



The toddler got her hands on my brush and added some... blue... streaks. Waaa!

I almost wanted to start on another piece from scratch but I ploughed ahead and it went quite well I think :)

 The great thing about Chinese painting watercolour is that you can still dilute and mix it even after it has dried up on the paper unlike regular watercolour stains which can be a bit stubborn. But since I liked the texture of the blue streaks I decided to leave some in. 

Oi! #5

Happy Family

I did this piece at a friend's request. It's for a book project she is working on. It took me quite a while to finish since I could only grab 5 or 10 minutes here and there before the little one started climbing on my lap and knocking things over. 

I've been wanting to try gouache for quite some time so this was the perfect excuse to get myself a set. It was surprisingly not easy to find. Hmmm.

Faces

I managed to find some time to do a spot of drawing this past week. Here are two that I did. I used my favourite pen - Pilot G-TEC-C4. You can get really fine, clear lines. Unfortunately, the ink is not water resistant. But that's ok. For the hair and other details that require filling in I used ZIG Brushables by Kuretake. 

I'm hoping that I'll be able to get more done soon. Fingers crossed :)

Green and yellow

Yup. Still at it. This time I used a small piece cut up from an old cotton pillow case. It absorbs better than the calico I used for the Oi! bag + Pouch #13 and applies easier than the cotton linen I used for Pouch #14. But as you can see, the paint spreads a bit.

New old sewing machine

My mother has been wanting to get rid of her old sewing machine for a long time now. It gives her a headache to see it collecting dust. Now that I have some idea how to use one, I sent it for repairs and got it back today! As good as old :)

Check out all the knobs and stuff.

And here's the pedal.

Ain't it gorgeous!

After using the industrial sewing machine over at the Foundation, this feels more like a toy. It even sounds like one! But I am so happy it works. All I need to do is forget about the zig zag option, ignore  "darn" knob and use it only for straight stitches. Hahaha!

 It's not very stable sitting like that but the actual sewing machine table is too heavy to transport from my mom's house over to our place. Will need to enlist some help soon. Meanwhile I'm going to get to know my new old sewing machine :) 

Note: 

Apparently my mom can't remember if she got the sewing machine before or after I was born. That would make it about 4 decades old. And it still works! Wow!

It's washable!

My new friend Agnieszka was wondering if the fabric markers are permanent enough to withstand washing. I've been wondering about that myself so today I popped this pouch into the washing machine to find out. 

And here it is! Right out of the washing machine. No fading, no running, no bleeding. Stained by Sharpie Fabric Markers work! I'll take another picture when the pouch has dried.

BTW you must check out Agnieszka's work over at her blog. Lovely! :)

WIP - pouch #7

I've had this piece of grey fabric for quite a while now so I thought I'd use it to make some pouches. Managed to get four out of it. I'm also using the felt I bought yesterday for the birds. I tested the Sharpie Fabric Markers on them but they don't work on felt. As you can see I'll need to embroider on the details. Will show you when it's done :) 

Felt

I'm actually not a big fan of felt but I needed something that doesn't fray at the edges. So I bought a whole rainbow over at Daiso, a popular Japanese chain store that has been popping up all over town. 

Great colours!

Tools of the trade

Before getting a decent liner brush, I was using this. That's right. Your eyes are not deceiving you. I cut the bristles off. I had to. I just couldn't find anything finer in any of the stores until I came across this one below at Art Friend.

What a difference! In price as well :) My old brush costs around five bucks. The new one was 4 times more. I don't know when I'll be able to splurge again and I still love my old one which I know I'll buy more of in the very near future but in the meantime this is the star.
 

Here's my table top when I am working on something. A bit of a mess, I know. I've got some nice acrylic paints and my one and only prized bottle of acrylic ink in indigo. There's my Lyra watercolour set and those small paint pots are either hand-me-down poster colours I "inherited" from Sweetie #1 or newly bought ones from local stationery shops around town for a buck and a half each.

And yes, I'll be changing the water soon :)